BEIJING’S CONSTRUCTION OF MILITARY BASES IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA is the culmination of a plan that dates back to the seventh century BC and the first stages of the building of the Great Wall. Through Chinese eyes it is about protection, not aggression. “We are not trying to take over these islands and territory,” Ruan Zongze of the China Institute of International Studies told me in Beijing. “What China is doing is to safeguard and defend its own legitimate rights, not like the Americans who start wars all over the world. China will never do that.”
Over the centuries China created buffers against hostile neighbors by taking territory to its north, including Manchuria, now China’s northeastern region that borders North Korea and Russia and is just across the water from Japan; Mongolia, which China split in two—Inner Mongolia, controlled by Beijing, and Outer Mongolia, now an independent nation, but governed under the wing of the Soviet Union during the Cold War; Xinjiang, the troubled Muslim region that leads through to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and the insurgent-ridden Kashmir region, which is disputed between China and India.
What it failed to construct were southern and eastern maritime defenses to protect its coastline from foreign invasion by sea and, because of this, it received a brutal wake-up call in November 1839 when British troops stormed ashore near the southern port of Guangzhou, determined to increase Britain’s opium exports into China from its colony in India.
In China’s history, the First Opium War marks the start of its Century of Humiliation, which ended 110 years later in 1949 when Mao Zedong came to power. The defeat highlighted a weakness that China will never forget, and the story is told vividly in the amply funded Opium War and Sea Battle Museum in Humen, where the British invaded. Events are embedded in the mind of every student, from school to university and beyond. “It is not only at primary school that we are taught this,” said Jinan University student Lu Chu Hau, who showed me around. “At middle school, at university, at home, at work, it is drummed into us so that we know that China must never be weak again.”
A long elegant expressway bridge now spans the stretch of the Pearl River where British gunboats blasted their way in. Fortified ramparts still remain, with huge cannons in their original firing positions behind thick stone walls. They had a range of almost a mile, but not enough to prevent defeat. The ramparts were once part of a seawall designed to stop foreign warships. But they were only half built, and their original purpose has now been extended to the new South China Sea islands. The area where British redcoats and Chinese soldiers fought hand-to-hand has been turned into a parking lot filled with buses delivering schoolchildren to the museum to learn their nation’s history.
Opium is a narcotic that gives short-term euphoria but slows the brain and damages health. In 1839 addiction levels were as high as 15 percent of the population, spanning all social classes. A modern-day photo montage of a lively, healthy young woman gradually being destroyed by opium is displayed at the museum entrance. You see her deteriorate from being vivacious and filled with energy to finally becoming listless, head hanging, skin blotched and eyes dulled.
The exhibits show how a legendary local viceroy, Lin Zexu, was uncompromising in his opposition to opium. His operations to arrest traffickers and burn drug hauls are reminiscent of drug wars today against Latin American cartels. Because of Lin’s doggedness, Britain felt compelled to use force. Arguing that this was an issue of free trade, it deployed the military.
The invasion was not without controversy, and many parliamentarians viewed it as illegal. In 1840 the young Liberal Party member William Gladstone, who went on to become prime minister, told the House of Commons that the policy of trafficking narcotics covered his country in a “permanent disgrace.” The British flag had become a pirate flag, he argued. But Parliament ignored him. The museum gives a prominent position to Gladstone’s parliamentary address, with a cutout figure in full flow.
Although superior in firepower and military expertise, Britain took three years to force a surrender that was concluded with the 1842 Treaty of Nanking. The treaty made scant reference to opium and spoke euphemistically about “mercantile transactions,” the emphasis being that Britain’s action had given China an understanding of free trade and international law. The terms included China opening up Guangzhou and four other coastal cities to foreign trade, and China was made to pay compensation for the opium it had seized. Britain took the sovereignty of Hong Kong Island, to be controlled by two private opium exporters, William Jardine and James Matheson. Their company, Jardine Matheson, came to symbolize the power of the Taipan and British colonial rule in Asia and still operates today as a successful multinational company.
For China, it was as if a Mexican drug cartel had blasted its way into the southern United States, demanding that Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas open themselves up to cocaine sales while forcing a weakened America to sign agreements that defined an alternative, modern way in which trade and law operated.
Britain did not stop with the Treaty of Nanking. In 1856 it sought even deeper access within China. By now the West, uniting under the banners of Christianity and trade, claimed that its merchants and soldiers had the moral right to go anywhere they chose. Supported by France, Russia, and the United States, Britain launched the Second Opium War in which, among other acts of destruction, troops entered Beijing and sacked and looted the Summer Palace, a complex of imperial buildings, gardens, and lakes known as the Garden of Perfect Brightness.
China was powerless to stop them. This time fighting lasted fourteen years until China surrendered for the second time in 1860 with the Convention of Beijing. Swaths of coastal areas were handed over to colonizing Western powers, as if—to stay with the analogy—the drug cartels, having secured the southwestern part of the United States, pushed on to New York and Washington, DC.
Britain’s National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, near London, also displays exhibits of the Opium Wars. They take up a small, uncrowded corner with the story told in the wider context of the colonization of India. The account is accurate, but as in the school curricula of Western democracies, the Opium Wars story is but a part, while for China this is the story that propels the policies it now implements. China has never hidden its own historical weaknesses. In a speech on July 1, 2017, to mark the twentieth anniversary of China regaining control of Hong Kong, President Xi Jinping raised the Opium Wars and put Britain’s victory down to “a weak China under corrupt and incompetent feudal rule.”3
After the consolidation (and then chaos) of Mao Zedong, and the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping is regarded as a new strongman implementing policies to regain China’s long-lost strength. He calls it “the great rejuvenation.” Until seven hundred years ago China led the world in living standards, overtaken first by Italy,4 and bit by bit the rot of corruption and bad governance set in. By the time British troops invaded, China had suffered centuries of misrule. “Sure, China was a victim of Western imperialism,” notes China scholar Frank Ching. “But this was simply the last straw that broke the back of a dying camel.”5
The Opium War Museum does not hide historical failures and displays face-to-face exhibits that show China’s decline in parallel with the rise of Europe. On one side are images of a backward, feudal, agricultural society, and on the other telescopes, maps, clocks, and books, all of which gave the West the technology to win. While “science, democracy and the Industrial Revolution” were in full swing in the West, China’s development was at a standstill, we are told, and I noted the deliberate use of the word “democracy” in a museum set up by a one-party state.
The emphasis of blame was not on an immoral use of strength, which echoes around much of the Middle East, but on China’s weakness, a lesson learned in hindsight that instead of fighting Britain, it would have been wiser to have embraced and learned from it. As we see later, this is what its Asian neighbor, Japan, did in 1854 when faced with a similar display of hostile Western firepower.
The museum fails to explain exactly how broken China was in the middle of the eighteenth century. For twenty years, from 1851 to 1871, the Taiping Rebellion, led by a man who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, left millions dead in the southern part of the country. The casualties from Britain’s military action were by comparison minuscule, but drove home the point that without a better internal system of government China would never be able to withstand foreign invasion.
It is this narrative of strong, forward-looking internal government coupled with effective military defense that mirrors much of China’s argument today, which flows directly to Beijing’s South China Sea activities and is causing antagonism.
“You cannot overestimate the impact of the Opium Wars,” Milton Nong Ye, professor of history at Guangzhou’s Jinan University, told me. “We learned then that the international world order is unfair.” He drew a comparison between the Opium Wars and the compromises China had made to join the World Trade Organization in 2001. Only fifteen years later, thinking it had made all necessary concessions, China found that the Western power demanded more. It found itself excluded from the US-sponsored Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, from which Washington has now withdrawn.
“China is not safe and has been invaded many times,” Ye said. “The way to protect ourselves is to build a great wall of the sea, and you do that with big ships and strong islands.”